Inducing jurors to disregard inadmissible evidence: A legal explanation does not help.

Abstract

Three experiments investigated mock jurors' ability to disregard inadmissible prior conviction evidence and hearsay. In Experiments 1 and 2, college students listened to an audiotape enacting a theft trial. The critical evidence favored the prosecution and was objected to by the defense. In three different conditions the judge either ruled the evidence admissible, ruled it inadmissible, or ruled it inadmissible and explained the legal basis for the ruling. In a fourth condition no critical evidence was presented. The critical witness' credibility was also manipulated. With prior conviction evidence but not hearsay the legal explanation "backfired." In addition, the critical witness' credibility did not affect subjects' ability to disregard inadmissible evidence. The results of Experiment 3 suggest that the legal explanation may have affected the use of hearsay and prior conviction evidence differently because of subjects' dissimilar preconceptions of the fairness of using the two evidence items to assess guilt.One area of interest to researchers is whether juries (and individual jurors) are truly competent to make decisions that have significant implications for defendants and for society in general. Studies have investigated the ability of jurors to understand (e.g., Reifman, Gusick, & Ellsworth, 1992) and follow (Smith, 1993) judges' instructions, to comprehend quantitative evidence (Kaye & Koehler, * I am grateful to the following individuals for their assistance with this research: for help with data collection, Kerry McCafferty, Frank Ross, Lana Symmes, and Marsennia Wells; for their fine acting on the audiotapes,

Correcting false information in memory: Manipulating the strength of misinformation encoding and its retraction

“…The effectiveness of multiple retractions after strong encoding of misinformation does not support concerns that multiple retractions could enhance continued influence by increasing familiarity of the misinformation Skurnik et al, 2005; see also Hintzman, 2010). It follows that the so-called backfire effects of retractions (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010;Pickel, 1995) may apply primarily to areas such as political beliefs or judicial settings, in which preexisting attitudes play a more important role for behavior.…”

“…In other words, the retraction could serve as a recursive reminder of the misinformation (Hintzman, 2010). Such backfire effects of retractions have been observed in examinations of the effects of retractions on political misperceptions (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010) and mock juror behavior (Pickel, 1995), and are obviously a reason for concern.…”

Seeking the opinions of others online: Evidence of evaluation overshoot

“…In one such study, Petty and Wegener (1994) found that rating the desirability of taking a vacation in a desirable holiday destination lowered subsequent evaluations of taking a vacation in a nonholiday destination. Evidence that invalidated information may continue to contaminate future judgments is well established in testimony research where several authors have found that inadmissible evidence given during a trial continues to contaminate judgments after participants are instructed to ignore the information (Pickel, 1995;Schul & Manzury, 1990;Sommers & Kassin, 2001).…”

From Learning to Doing: The Effects of Educating Individuals on the Pervasiveness of Bias

“…Thus, even if the education is effective in addressing the first two steps, people may still not be able to detect the magnitude of the bias or know how to adjust their response to compensate for it. In courtroom research, for example, people find it difficult to disregard material that they have been instructed to ignore (Kassin & Sommers, 1997;Pickel, 1995;Sue, Smith, & Caldwell, 1973). The idea is that the judge"s instructions to disregard produce a "backfire effect" (Cox & Tanford, 1989) whereby individuals pay more attention to the evidence than if the judge had said nothing regarding the evidence.…”